


tell me again tomorrow

by Wallyallens



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Post 4x03, THESE NERDS ARE SO IN LOVE, after The Moment and he tells her to sleep, bc i am drunk and emotional and they should, so they finally say it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 07:00:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9808373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallyallens/pseuds/Wallyallens
Summary: Bellamy knows his name is on the list - it's there, in ink, saying he deserves to live - but it eats at him, until he asks Clarke why she made that decision. (Spoiler alert: they can't live without each other).





	

There’s his name on a piece of paper, and it shouldn’t mean anything, but it does.

It means someone picked him. Someone decided he, above others, deserves to live. And that’s such a strange feeling that it feels like air filling his chest, making breaths hard to suck in through gritted teeth hard to take, makes his head light and hands shake as he takes the pen and adds her name below his, and Bellamy doesn’t know what to do with a feeling like that. It’s too strong, too big; it would swallow him whole if faced head on, so he tells her to sleep and ignores the way his entire body crackles with electricity at her touch.

But that doesn’t mean it goes un-noticed.

In fact, it goes very much noticed, present in his mind, as Clarke lays down and his boots clunk dully on the metal as he paces the corridors. He isn’t protecting her, he thinks, but walking the perimeter is easier than watching her sleep and thinking about how she somehow still thinks his side is a place worth standing. Even after the times they had stood apart. Even after the times they had stood on opposite sides of a fight to save their people, each thinking their way was the best way, and leaving un-breachable trenches in the space between them. Even then – she had found her way back again, crossing no man’s land, and there she was. Bellamy was grateful beyond words to not have to stand alone anymore; to know that someone had his back. But it made the world all the more complicated when he wanted to save everyone and she somehow wanted to save everyone and _then_ the people who tried to kill them and -

Thinking is hard. It gets under his skin and into his blood until his entire body is pumping a single thought: kill or die, do or don’t, fight or stop, and now it is singing louder than usual. He is used to pacing, to mulling things over, to taking the weight of the world on a palm scarred by the barrel of a gun and testing whether or not he can take it.

But – but this is different.

It means something more. That, he knows. That he can _feel_. Bellamy just doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Fuck.”

The word leaves him in a breath. Bellamy closes his eyes, letting it form and fall free, his lungs breaking their constriction to rise and fall again as he gasps the word out, placing a hand on the wall to steady himself. His step becomes a stumble, and the metal under his hand is icy as he grasps onto the wall, biting into him, iron bolts digging into his palm as he leans more heavily, shoulder joining his hand against the wall a moment later. For support, they rest, letting him gasp much needed breaths of air that does not corrupt, which fills his lungs full of sweetness and the smell of flowers, and this is what life should be, he thinks.

This is a love that does not burn but still leaves a scar, there and visible, carried with him so that even when only his footprints leave impressions on the dirt, he is not alone, because she is always with him. This is the kind of love that builds instead of destroys, which makes flowers grow and creates a home and lets him believe that maybe, just maybe, his name does deserve to be on that list.

But he had tried for all of his life to find that value in himself, struggled to do it, and still it was an effort. Finding it in others was so much simpler. He lived for Octavia; his job was to keep her safe and make her smile. He lived for his people, for the hundred on the ground; his role was a leader, a war commander, to make the calls nobody else wanted to. He lived for the ark; for the crumbling shell of a community now fighting for every step taken on the ground, followed Pike because that’s who they chose as their leader, and he was so very tired of watching the people he loved die. He lived for all of them. Bellamy took each bloody, shuddering breath for the people he loved.

It was so easy to fight for them, to live for them – but for himself? It was a wall, one he picked at, finding reasons in the foundations why he deserved to see his own name scratched in black ink, stark against a page which seemed to ache with the absence of those who were missing from it.

It is a dumb decision, but he pulls his gun from the holster and places it on the ground. It lands with an empty thud which shatters the space louder than any bullet could have, but the weight shifts somehow, leaving him, and Bellamy is able to stand again. For a moment, he looks at the gun on the ground. It seems insane that such a small thing could carry such a weight. Then, knowing Jaha is somewhere nearby and even though the world is ending and they haven’t been safe in a year, they are safe _for now_ , and that has to be enough – he leaves his gun lying on the ground and walks back towards her.

Bellamy’s feet work faster than his mind is able to at that moment, and before he can register the decision, he is standing at her door.

And then he just, stops. Because it has always been hard to see clearly when Clarke is around – she is a hurricane, she is a wind that destroys where it touches, she fills his sails and blows him away and either way, takes his breath away – and he needs a minute before he sees her again to remember that he is the water and she is the wind, and she can either change tides or create tempests, but he will always be the sea, with or without her. But God, what a storm they were when time ticked in just the right way, and luck was on their side, and the day shone just a fraction brighter; and they were together.

Slowly, after what seemed like an age, Bellamy raised a hand and knocked on her door. The sound travelled hollowly through the hallway and echoed through his bones. He waited, and the door opened, light cracking out.

“Bellamy?” And there she was blinking against the light as if she had been sleeping, although the dark circles beneath her eyes betrayed the fact that she had been lying awake, as tortured over words on paper as he was. “Has something happened? What’s wrong?”

And there’s the five-star, million dollar, secret to the universe fucking question.

“Why me?”

And it slips out almost by accident. He doesn’t mean to ask it, because it’s not fair and he can handle his own shit and – and a lot of things, but there is it anyway, coming out of his lips and flooding the world in fifty foot neon yellow letters.

Clarke blinks. “What?”

“After everything. After Pike. Why did you put me on that list?”

“Because the world without you is not a world worth living in,” she says, and then she looks at him. Clarke can see into his soul, and all he can see is her, and it hurts but it’s a good kind of hurt. It reminded him that he was still alive. “Because if you don’t survive this, I don’t survive this.”

“But you didn’t write your own name on that list.”

It sounds inadequate. The words fall limply from his lips and clog the space between them, so that although his bones ache to close the distance, Bellamy finds his feet rooted to the ground. He wants to go to her. He always has. But words are not enough, and they fall flat in saying that a world without her in it is unthinkable, that he would die a thousand times before seeing that world, that the only world he wants any part of is the one where they get to stand together and know that they did well, and that their people are safe, and they could feel the sun on their faces and know those facts to be true.

He was never good with words anyway. Bellamy loved to read them, to caress books in a way that touching people was hard, to throw away loose words to inspire or reassure or incite – but when they counted, when they really mattered, when it was words bleeding out of every open wound on his body – they failed him.

Words never felt enough. He expressed through actions – a touch, a stand, a look – and it was the best he could do.

“No,” she agrees. It holds the same hollow absence as his own words did. “I didn’t.”

“It should be there.”

“Maybe.”

“It should be there,” he repeats. It’s stronger this time, and his voice resonates with the metal space in an echo that carries westward and eastward to eternity. “If there’s a world after this – a better one, a worse one, either way – you deserve to see it.”

“So do you,” she says. There’s no hesitation, no doubt, and he thinks his heart falters there, for a minute.

“I don’t know about that,” he replies. “But if you’re there, I’ll wait to see that day with you. I think that together we might just stand a chance.”

“Do you?”

“I do,” Bellamy says. “Or at least, that’s a future worth fighting for. To see that day.”

“To see that day,” Clarke repeats softly. Her lips are soft and pink, and they curve around the words with such clarity that when they bend around his own, firm and sure and _real_ , he sinks into the kiss. Bellamy doesn’t even remember closing the space between them; only that he wanted to be close to her, and the feel of Clarke’s fingers in his hair, and the sound of their breathing filling her room. He remembers the sharp stab of pain when he hits his against the metal edge of her bed, and the way her eyes shone when he rested their foreheads together, her own nodding gently at his pause, fingers in his hair and on his jaw, drawing them closer, and the way she smelled of oil and dirt. She tasted of earth. Clarke’s lips smiled into his own as he kissed her, and he trusted that look more than anything he had seen since his feet touched the ground.

She was real, she was there, and although the end was coming in some threat hidden in murky waters, indistinct and hard to see at the present, the fact that she was there with him to face it meant everything. He stopped questioning why that was a long time ago, after she gave him absolution but before the end of the world, the first time around. It was just _right_ – they were just made to be this way.

Bellamy would be happy to die in those arms.

“Clarke?” he asks, his voice low and croaky, and yet somehow it still cracks on her name. She is lying beside him, tucked under his arms and pressing against his chest with every breath she takes, skin ghosting along his ribcage and leaving behind the pinpricks of dotted flesh which announced she had been there, clear as day. She hums in response, twisting around so that her chin rested on his shoulder, jarring and jutting uncomfortably against the bone but even despite that, he laughs, feeling the warmth of her breath against his ear and the tickle of her hair against his chest. He can barely breathe, but he can finally say the truth he’s been chasing for months now. “I love you.”

He feels her smile more than sees it, her lips pressing into the crook of his neck and sending shivers down his spine, deep into the core of the earth.

“I know,” she says.

“What do we do if the world ends?”

“What we can. What we have to,” she replies. Her voice shakes, and even as he moves to hold her in response, his thumb moving to rub her shoulder, her own hand grabs at his hip and pulls him closer, nails digging into his side. “We survive.”

It was what they did, after all. He huffs a laugh at that, the weight of Clarke shifting against his chest at the movement and re-settling.

“And then?”

“Then you tell me that again tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days we have left.”

“I love you,” he says again, because it was true, and it’s the end of the world, and if he doesn’t say it now, when would the right time be? There is no right time. No fairytale. No grand, great ending to all of this. just the two of them, scarred and empty as they were, holding onto one another under fluorescent blue lights and wondering when that fragile glow would be extinguished.

“Bellamy,” she whispers. His name sounds like a prayer on her lips, and he wants to close his eyes in reverence and feel her lips between his teeth. It was so easy to get lost in her. If he could just stay there forever, tangled like this, her leg between his thighs and curled against him, that would be enough. “I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything.”

That’s an easy thing to promise. There had always been this thing about him, where he could do impossible things if it was someone else asking. Break mountains; walk away; stand where his heart was cracking and watch her leave. What she says stops him short, though – it steals his thoughts and senses.

“Live,” Clarke says, softly. “Live for me. Survive this, and meet me in that better day. I know it’s hard. I feel it, too. But do that for me, _please_. Stay alive.”

“Sure, princess,” he replies. It cracks: a throat-dry, soul-exposed, everything-on-display kind of break in his voice. Bellamy pours out through the words, pours every scrap of hope and fight he has left into it, and wonders if it’s enough to see him through this. After all these apocalypses, they were running low on miracles. Maybe this was his, lying with her, and surviving was an ask too far – but she was asking, so of course he laughs, and presses his lips to her forehead, and tries. “And I thought you were gonna ask something hard.”

She chuckles, and her head bobs against his chest, filling it with light. There’s a warmth again as she kisses his neck, and he is half asleep when she whispers back into the darkness.

“I love you too, just so you know. You _should_ know.”

If he sleeps soundly for the first time in months, unwoken by nightmares or disaster, Bellamy doesn’t tell anyone afterwards. He wakes and she is still there, not a dream, and breathes in as she breathes out, in synch with the universe, until the lazy golden light filters through just bright enough to wake her. Blue eyes, the bluest blue ever, open and meet his own, and they’re both smiling, and the world is far away.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” he echoes, looking down at her. “So what happens today?”

“You keep your promise.”

Bellamy blinks in confusion, dust in scattered sunlight filling his eyes, until he remembers, tugging at her mouth until they’re both smiling through a kiss, and with the same breath he gasps as they break apart, he affirms. “I love you.”

“Tell me again tomorrow.”

She kisses him again. He would do it, day after day, as the struggled and stumbled their way towards whatever came next. He would keep his promise. The fact that he loved her would not change, and as long as she looked at him that way, Bellamy could believe that his name belonged on that list, too. It was enough. _They_ were enough. And until the world ended, that was how they would survive.

 _Together_.

**Author's Note:**

> first time writing for t100 so be nice :) also add me on tumblr @jeffersonjaxson!


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